Differences

Were living conditions similar or different?

The conditions that the poor lived in compared to the rich were very different. The sizes of homes for the poor would usually be only 2 to 3 rooms and an outside bathroom, whilst the rich would have a large house with multiple bedrooms, sometimes two stories and an inside bathroom that would be cleaned regularly. This would make the homes much more hygienic than the homes in the poor homes leaving them much less likely to come across disease and infection compared to the people who lived in the slums that would be at a real risk of disease. The rich families (even the middle class) would have had a garden or an area for the children to play in but the poor did not. Most children would play in the streets until late at night (usually 9pm) with their little equipment, usually just playing games that would not require equipment, just themselves. Children of the upper classes were usually forbidden to play on the streets because they were dirty, potentially unsafe and caused the children to interact with the lower classes.  The upper class houses were on top of the hill, whilst the lower class houses were at the bottom, depicting the social status well. The slums were very close to the Yarra River so when it rained, it would often flood (also because of the water that would run down to hill to their home) making them usually very damp and not very strong because the wood of the house could have been weakened by the constant affected by water, and also if the houses were made of some metals like tin then they could have rusted easily. The rich houses on top of the hill were quite dry and away from the flooding. The houses in the slums also would have been affected by the pollution from the factories. Their houses would have been in a very short distance from the factories, making their areas of living very unhealthy and bad for the children to live in, another cause for diseases in the area. This was the opposite for the families that lived at the top of the hill for they did not have many large and polluting factories around them, but more churches and gardens which kept their land quite fresh and not polluted at all.